Pull-Tabs ! Locationless, Locationless, Locationless
By fitzy_1965 on 16-Jul-19. Waypoint GA13890

Find a Pull-Tab !

Pull-Tabs are the old fashioned method of opening drink cans. Despite going out of use in Australia in the early 1980s you still find them lying around on the ground - usually in car parks or picnic areas that have been in use since pre-1980. So find a Pull-Tab while caching and tell me where you found it - including coords - and what cache you were doing at the time. Pictures please, hopefully on site with you or your GPSr.  

I found my Pull-Tab while visiting Shepherd's Lookout in the ACT while doing a cache called Whiffy Works II. 

A short history of opening drink cans (thanks to you-know-who):

The first commercial beer available in cans began in 1935 in Richmond, Virginia. Not long after that, sodas, with their higher acidity and somewhat higher pressures, were available in cans. The key development for storing drinks in cans was the interior liner, typically plastic or sometimes a waxy substance, that helped to keep the product's flavor from being ruined by a chemical reaction with the metal. Another major factor for the timing was the repeal of Prohibition in the United States at the end of 1933.

In 1935, the Felinfoel Brewery at Felinfoel in Wales was the first brewery outside the USA to commercially can beer. Prior to this time, beer was only available in barrels or in glass bottles. From this time, lightweight tin cans could be used. Felinfoel was a major supplier to British armed forces abroad in the Second World War - cans saved a great deal of space and weight for wartime exports compared to glass bottles, and did not have to be returned for refilling. These early cans did not have a pull tab, instead they had a crown cork (beer bottle top). All modern UK canned beer is descended from these small, early cans which helped change the drinking and beer-buying habits of the British public. From the 18th century until the early 20th century Wales dominated world tinplate production, peaking in the early 1890s when 80% of the world's tinplate was produced in south Wales.

Canned drinks were factory-sealed and required a special opener tool in order to consume the contents. Cans were typically formed as cylinders, having a flat top and bottom. They required a can piercer, colloquially known as a "church key", that latched onto the top rim for leverage; lifting the handle would force the sharp tip through the top of the can, cutting a triangular hole. A smaller second hole was usually punched at the opposite side of the top to admit air while pouring, allowing the liquid to flow freely.

In the mid-1930s, some cans were developed with caps so that they could be opened and poured more like a bottle. These were called "cone tops", as their tops had a conical taper up to the smaller diameter of the cap. Cone top cans were sealed by the same crimped caps that were put on bottles, and could be opened with the same bottle-opener tool. There were three types of conetops: high profile, low profile, and j-spout. The low profile and j-spout were the earliest, dating from about 1935. The "crowntainer" was a different type of can that was drawn steel with a bottom cap. These were developed by Crown Cork & Seal (now known as Crown Holdings, Inc.), a leading drink packaging and drink can producer. Various breweries used crowntainers and conetops until the late 1950s, but many breweries kept using the simple cylindrical cans.

The popularity of canned drinks was slow to catch on, as the metallic taste was difficult to overcome with the interior liner not perfected, especially with more acidic sodas. Cans had two advantages over glass bottles. First for the distributors, flat-top cans were more compact for transportation and storage and weighed less than bottles. Second for consumers, they did not require the deposit typically paid for bottles, as they were discarded after use. Glass-bottle deposits were reimbursed when consumers took the empties back to the store.

By the time the United States entered World War II, cans had gained only about ten percent of the drink container market; this was drastically reduced during the war to accommodate strategic needs for metal.

A pop tab from the 1970s

In 1959, the recyclable aluminum can was introduced to the market in a 7 oz. size by the Adolph Coors Company. Also in 1959, Ermal Fraze devised a can-opening method that would come to dominate the canned drink market. His invention was the "pull-tab". This eliminated the need for a separate opener tool by attaching an aluminium pull-ring lever with a rivet to a pre-scored wedge-shaped tab section of the can top. The ring was riveted to the center of the top, which created an elongated opening large enough that one hole simultaneously served to let the drink flow out while air flowed in. In 1959, while on a family picnic, Mr. Fraze had forgotten to bring a can opener and was forced to use a car bumper to open a can of beer. Thinking there must be an easier way, he later stayed up all night until he came up with the pull tab. Pull-tab cans, or the discarded tabs from them, were also called "pop-tops" colloquially. In Australia these were colloquially known as "ring-pull". Into the 1970s, the pull-tab was widely popular, but its popularity came with a significant problem, as people would frequently discard the pull-tabs on the ground as litter, or drop them into the can and risk choking on them. These problems were both addressed by the invention of the "push-tab". Used primarily on Coors Beer cans in the mid-1970s, the push-tab was a raised circular scored area used in place of the pull-tab. It needed no ring to pull up. Instead, the raised aluminium blister was pushed down into the can, with a small unscored piece that kept the tab connected after being pushed inside. Push-tabs never gained wide popularity because while they had solved the litter problem of the pull-tab, they created a safety hazard where the person's finger upon pushing the tab into the can was immediately exposed to the sharp edges of the opening. An unusual feature of the push-tab Coors Beer cans was that they had a second, smaller, push-tab at the top as an airflow vent — a convenience that was lost with the switch from can opener to pull-tab. The "push-tab" was introduced into Australia in the early 1980s and was locally known as "pop-tops".

The safety and litter problems were both eventually solved later in the 1970s with Daniel F. Cudzik's invention of the non-removing "Stay-Tab". The pull-ring was replaced with a stiff aluminium lever, and the removable tab was replaced with a pre-scored round tab that functioned similarly to the push-tab, but the raised blister was no longer needed, as the riveted lever would now do the job of pushing the tab open and into the interior of the can.

In 2008, an aluminium version of the crowntainer design was adopted for packaging Coca-Cola's Caribou Coffee drink. In 2004, Anheuser-Busch adopted an all-aluminium bottle for use with Budweiser and Bud Light beers.